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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26296219">The Light of Distant Stars</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon'>glorious_spoon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mortality, Non-Linear Narrative, Space Opera</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 08:48:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,391</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26296219</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>They leave Earth in the spring of 2340, six months after the dreams start.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>121</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Distant Stars</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is really just a series of interconnected scenes in the Space Opera that I am Probably Never Going to Write for this fandom. Gen-ish, found-family, Nile-centric future fic. :D</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They leave Earth in the spring of 2340, six months after the dreams start. The irony of the interstellar age, Nile thinks, is that it makes finding each other almost as difficult as it must have been thousands of years ago, when humanity was bound by oceans and long stretches of land, the trek across the Atlantic every bit as daunting as the trek to Alpha Centauri today.</p><p>In this case, at least they know where they’re going. It’s getting there that poses a problem.</p><p>“I can get us passage,” Booker says. “That’s not really the issue.”</p><p>Nile doesn’t look away from the window, the scattered lights of the city reflecting in the dark water lapping at the base of the building. “What is the issue, then?”</p><p>Booker sighs expressively, which is fair, probably. She knows. It’s been decades since she’s visited her mother’s grave, her brother’s. But knowing that she <em>could</em> is… something, at least. Quynh is in the Caucasus, or at least Nile is pretty sure that’s where she disappeared to, visiting the unmarked place where Andy’s ancient bones are buried. She’ll make that trip herself soon. Right now, she just wishes desperately that she could talk to her old friend and mentor just one more time. That she could have her dry wit and unsentimental kindness and advice; that she could have <em>someone else</em> to make the call. It should be Quynh, as the oldest of them, or Nicky and Joe as the most stable, but somehow that duty has fallen to Nile. Andy called that right from the beginning.</p><p>Lucky her.</p><p>“Okay,” she says eventually. “Yeah, it’s a problem, but we don’t all have to go.”</p><p>Booker huffs, but it’s Nicky who answers, gently. “Yes, we do.”</p><p>“Hm,” Joe says. It wouldn’t be clear who he was agreeing with if Nile hadn’t known him for more than three centuries</p><p>She closes her eyes. The images from the dream are easy to call up: a young woman’s terrified face in the instant before the airlock failed and sucked her out into the black. She’s pretty in a West Asian sort of way that reminds Nile, with a sharp pinch to her heart, of Dizzy. Pretty until hard vacuum got to her, anyway. It didn’t take them that long to retrieve her, but she must have died a dozen times between that first death and her gasping and puking awake on the steel slab in the shipboard morgue.</p><p>It’s a hell of an introduction to immortality. No wonder Quynh has gone so still and distant in the past few months.</p><p>Since then it’s all been just flashes: the infirmary ceiling, a small cell. Doctors in PPE. Needles in her arm and rapid, relentless questions. It takes them at least a week of dreams between the three of them to get her name, though. Iesha Haddad-Smith. Joe barks out a laugh when Nile wakes to tell them after a flash of medical documents on an old hard-screen showed up.</p><p>“What?” she asks.</p><p>“<em>Iesha</em>,” he says. “<em>She who lives</em>.”</p><p>“Jesus,” Nile sighs. Sometimes, she can understand why Andy was the way she was, back when they first brought her in. Kidnapped her, whatever. The distinction seems less important now than it did at the time. “Poor kid.”</p><p>“She has us,” Nicky offers. “Or she will.”</p><p>So, yeah. Leaving her alone isn’t exactly an option, Nile knows that. Doesn’t make the choice easy.</p><p>It’s easier--a little easier, anyway--when Quynh comes in off of a trans-continental flight two days later and takes a ferry lift to the 300th floor loft that Nile keeps in Dubai, which everyone else has been using as a crash pad in the months since the dreams started. Nicky and Joe, at least, have their own place. Or places, rather, hideaways and cottages and stretches of untouched land passed down through generations of sons and fathers who might as well be twins on the identity records. Booker keeps an apartment in Paris, when he’s not off brooding darkly somewhere or crashing on Nile’s couch. Quynh does her own thing. They see less of her since Andy died, but she’s here now, stepping down from the landing pad in flowing gauze and beaded hair, sensor pads wrapped around her wrists and hands. Like all of them, she has no implants, a habit that’s becoming a quaint affectation these days.</p><p>Sooner or later, it’ll be dangerously strange. Another thing they’ve had to deal with over the years: their healing will allow no implants, not even something as simple as a piercing. Nile has earrings in piercings that she got at the Lake Meadows Shopping Center sometime around Christmas of 2002, slightly off-angle punch-piercings administered by some long-dead college student.</p><p>They’re becoming increasingly out of step with the modern world, she thinks, although that’s probably been true for centuries before she died for the first time. Quynh was born before the rise of the Roman empire and spent centuries trapped beneath the water; the twenty-first century must have been as foreign to her as the twenty-fourth sometimes feels to Nile.</p><p>Quynh accepts the hugs that Nicky and Joe offer, inclines her head to Nile, and tosses a wrapped package to Booker. He catches it with a smile.</p><p>“Koumiss?” he asks, unwrapping it and peering inside. “You shouldn’t have. Really.”</p><p>“You’re welcome,” Quynh says, with a rare smile. “On the condition that you don’t breathe anywhere near me after you drink it.”</p><p>“Who said I planned to <em>drink</em> it? I thought I’d keep it to a monument to Andy and her absolutely appalling taste in booze.”</p><p>Centuries ago, that might have stung. In this moment, though, a smile crinkles Quynh’s eyes as Joe lets out a bark of laughter. “I still remember the first time I tried it. Taraz, what was it--1250? I thought the hangover would last for a week.”</p><p>“She did warn you,” Nicky says, also smiling. “Quynh. It’s so good to see you.”</p><p>“And you,” she said. “Nile.”</p><p>Nile shrugs, spreads her hands, and smiles. “I guess we got one more for dinner, then. Lucky for you, Nicky’s cooking.”</p><p>“The rest of you will have to learn sometime,” he calls back, retreating into the kitchen, from which a pleasantly savory smell is starting to emerge. Nile doesn’t know what he’s making, and isn’t even sure that the pots and pans were actually in there when he and Joe arrived; it’s completely possible that he looked at her kitchen, which is pristine in a way that can only be achieved by living exclusively on takeout, and ordered a full set of cooking implements to be delivered along with the ingredients.</p><p>“Now, why would I do that when I have you?”</p><p>“She’s using you for food, habibi.”</p><p>“As if you haven’t been for centuries.”</p><p>“At least I <em>can</em> cook.”</p><p>“Hey,” Nile says. “I’m a modern woman, and doorside delivery is a gift of the modern world.”</p><p>Booker snorts without looking up from his screen. “Ain’t none of us modern, kid.”</p><p>“Well,” Quynh says. “One of us is, now.”</p><p>That’s enough to turn the mood in the room serious. Nile rubs a hand over her head, then says, “Yeah. We were trying to figure out what to do about that.”</p><p>Quynh gives her a blank stare. “We go after her. Of course. Are we taking a vote?”</p><p>Booker laughs roughly, and Joe shakes his head. From the kitchen, Nicky calls, “I told you.”</p><p>“Okay, okay,” Nile says. “Yeah, I guess we’re all for it then. Let’s do this.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. 2031</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s not the first time any of them has been in space. Joe and Nicky were in some of the first flights to Mars, back when it was a years-long round trip even inside the solar system. They’ve all been up in orbit a time or two, and Quynh spent about a decade back in the 2200’s working on the expanding moon base. Nile is still pretty sure that she single-handedly took down a vicious smuggling company that was behind a series of suspicious and deadly shuttle accidents, but every time she’s brought it up she’s gotten nothing more than a satisfied, catlike smile.</p><p>There’s nothing new about it, is the point. But this is different: this is a long-haul space flight to catch up to a generation fleet, where it’ll be decades or maybe centuries before they make it back to Earth. If they ever do.</p><p>“Well,” Nile says, once Booker’s managed to get the passage booked. He used one of his long-cultivated shady networks to get them on a protectorate fleet, the only thing that’s got a chance in hell of catching up to the ship with their new immortal. “It’ll be something new, anyway.”</p><p>He raises his eyebrows with a dry and skeptical look that makes it clear he can see right through her, but all he says is, “It certainly will be that.”</p><p>“Oh, shut up,” Nile says, slapping his shoulder lightly. “Make sure you upload my book collection. The <em>whole</em> thing.”</p><p>“I don’t know if the ship’s computer has that much storage space,” Booker says, as if his isn’t just as bad.</p><p>“What is this, Star Trek?” Nile retorts. “Ship’s computer. My god.”</p><p>“I remember when that first aired,” Joe says, kicking his bare feet up into Nicky’s lap. Nicky chuckles softly, digging his thumbs into the arches. “That little house we had in Newcastle, with the state-of-the-art television. Technicolor. Ah. Captain Kirk…”</p><p>“Oh please don’t tell me you had the hots for William Shatner when Nichelle Nichols was <em>right</em> there,” Nile says, laughing.</p><p>“I have never claimed to be a man of good taste,” Joe says. Nicky makes a noise of protest, and Joe opens one eye to squint at him. “Present company excepted, of course.”</p><p>“Of course,” Nicky retorts. “And it was DeForest Kelley you liked, anyway.”</p><p>“Those blue eyes,” Joe agrees nostalgically.</p><p>“<em>Nichelle Nichols</em>,” Nile repeats, because <em>come on</em>.</p><p>“What she said,” Quynh interjects from her seat at the kitchen island. She’s got three holo-screens up, scrolling through a dizzying array of banking data as she sips from a cup of delicately jasmine-scented tea that she definitely got from Nile’s hidden stash. Which is probably just as well, Nile thinks with a jolt. Might as well use it up. Their time on Earth can be measured in months now.</p><p>“See?” Nile says. “At least one of you has good taste. Is there any more tea?”</p><p>“In the pot on the counter. I made extra for you.”</p><p>“I appreciate that,” Nile says dryly, going to pour a cup full, “seeing as it’s my tea.”</p><p>“Just so,” Quynh says, and smiles as she slides the sugar dish over.</p><hr/><p>The first time she met Quynh in person, the introduction came with a knife between the ribs. She’d had dozens of deaths by then, but somehow that initial jolt of agony never got easier. Nile clawed at her, reaching for her gun, and she had a confused impression of eyes like chips of obsidian before the knife-point flicked up and a wash of red agony carried her down into blackness.</p><p>She woke up on Andy’s couch, with a decorative throw pillow under her head and an argument going on somewhere to her left.</p><p>“—completely stupid, and you know it,” Joe was saying loudly. “You should have told us.”</p><p>“It wasn’t your call to make.”</p><p>“Oh, <em>bullshit.”</em></p><p>“Joe. Come on.” There was Nicky, keeping the peace as always. Or trying to, anyway. “Andy, how long has this been going on?”</p><p>“A while,” Andy said lightly. Nile opened her eyes, stared up at the ceiling for a minute, then levered herself upright, prodding carefully at the spot over her heart where the knife had gone in. The skin was whole, of course, but her blouse was ruined. “Nile’s back with us.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Nile said dryly. “I need to borrow a shirt. I didn’t come over today expecting to get stabbed.”</p><p>“In the closet on the left side of the bedroom.”</p><p>Andy didn’t even sound apologetic. Nile rolled her eyes and got off the couch to go down the hallway, making a mental note to send Andy an invoice for her ruined shirt. It had been like thirty bucks at some market stall in Guinea, but the turquoise color looked great on her, and anyway it was the principle of the thing.</p><p>The argument had died down by the time that she returned in one of Andy’s dark gray t-shirts, which she probably bought in three-packs at the local bag sale. Joe was scowling; Nicky looked exasperated, Andy bored.</p><p>“So that’s Quynh,” Nile said, like she hadn’t been dreaming of the woman’s face for the past decade and change.</p><p>“That’s Quynh,” Nicky agreed. “She’s been… visiting with Andy, apparently.”</p><p>“In between murder sprees,” Joe interjected. He still sounded pissed.</p><p>“We’ve been talking,” Andy allowed serenely.</p><p>“Okay,” Nile said. Reasonable, she was using her reasonable voice. “But how do you know she’s not going to kill you?”</p><p>“She doesn’t,” Joe said flatly, folding his arms across his chest.</p><p>Andy smiled up at them. She’d been letting her hair grow out in the past few years, and it was braided into a gray-streaked crown around her head. It should have made her look softer, but somehow the effect was the exact opposite: sharp-edged and fierce, like the warrior queen she had been in millennia past, the woman who’d been worshipped as a god. “You’re right. I don’t. But if anyone has the right, it’s her.”</p><p>“Andy—”</p><p>“I’ve loved her for more than two thousand years. If it were Nicky—” Nile saw Joe flinch, and Andy must have as well, but she didn’t stop. “If it were Nicky, what would you do?”</p><p>“Low blow, Andromache,” Nicky murmured, but the words held an edge of amusement.</p><p>“Damn you,” Joe said softly. He tugged a hand through his curls before letting it drop. “I would want to see him. To be with him, even if it meant my death.”</p><p>Nicky breathed out a sigh and moved closer, allowing Joe to lean against his hip. Nile ran a hand over her scalp, over the comforting bumps of her braids. “Jesus. Next time—” She saw Joe start to open his mouth, and cut him a look. There would be a next time. There wasn’t a single living soul who could make Andy do something she didn’t want to do, and Nile wasn’t about to waste her time trying. “Next time, warn us, huh? Unlike you people, I’m not quite blase about a knife to the heart just yet.”</p><p>Andy didn’t apologize for that, but she did, eventually, incline her head. “Next time, I’ll warn you.”</p><hr/><p>Next time, Quynh breezed out of the loft like a queen with her head held high. She didn’t acknowledge Nile, but she didn’t stab her, either.</p><p>Three hundred years later, she’s hanging out in Nile’s kitchen drinking her tea. Immortality is a funny thing.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Interlude: 2070</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A funeral and a reconciliation.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It hadn’t been a hundred years; it had barely been half of that, but Andy’s body aged and withered like any mortal’s. It had been decades since she’d come out with them, and years since she’d moved reluctantly into assisted living, flatly refusing any and all offers of caretaking from the rest of them. Nicky and Joe seemed entirely baffled by that; Quynh was as unreadable as always, as unpredictable as a cat, slinking in at odd hours before disappearing again, avoiding the rest of them as often as not. She hadn’t killed any of them recently, so Nile was taking that as a good sign.</p><p>For herself, she got it. Maybe just because she’d kept watch on her mom in those last years, from a distance--discreetly funnelling money into accounts, making sure that Jackson and his children--grandchildren now, too, Jesus--wouldn’t go broke keeping her comfortable. Maybe it was just that the very idea of mortality was closer for her than it was for any of them, for all they’d known Andy for a millennium instead of fifty years. Nile didn’t begrudge them that, but she was jealous sometimes all the same.</p><p>Andy was clear-headed, at least, even now. Even when she got so tired these days, she laughed and told raunchy jokes that made her aides blush, and played some obscure strategic game with Joe that he’d been unsuccessfully trying to teach Nile for years now, and let Nicky read to her, and fell asleep with her head cradled in Quynh’s lap and Quynh’s fingers stroking through hair that had gone as white and wispy as gossamer.</p><p>And then there was Booker.</p><p>Nile didn’t know if the others had been expecting it, but she wasn’t surprised when the door at the end of the hall swung open well after visiting hours to admit a tall figure, hunched against the night. Beside her on the bench, Joe stiffened, then stood slowly, folding his arms as Booker approached.</p><p>“You’ve got some fucking nerve,” he said sharply, then added something in French that was too quick for Nile to follow but that made Booker flinch and hunch in on himself further.</p><p>“I just want to--please. Please just let me see her. Then I’ll go.”</p><p>“Let him in,” Nile said quietly, and Joe lifted his head, met her eyes for a long moment--then moved aside.</p><p>She felt something in her shift at that, like the bedrock of her world had irrevocably changed. There was no time to dwell on it. Booker stepped through the doorway of the hospice room, then went to his knees so abruptly that Nile had the sudden wild thought that he must have been stabbed.</p><p>Then his breath came out raggedly, and he rested his forehead against the edge of the mattress. Andy’s thin hand lifted, then carded through his hair, and her voice was steady and fond when she spoke. “Hey, Book.”</p><p>“Hey, boss,” Booker said, raw. “Long time no see.”</p><p>Andy’s laugh was rusty. “Not that long.”</p><p>“Long enough.”</p><p>Joe’s hand settled on Nile’s shoulder, and when she looked up he wasn’t looking at her, but at them. The sudden flare of anger at Booker’s presence had all but vanished. He looked sad. Old, in a way that had nothing at all to do with his youthful face, and for all that Nile had yet to reach her first century, for all that she had people still living who remembered her as a child, she felt it too.</p><p>“We should go,” he said quietly.</p><p>Nile looked at the two of them: Booker’s head bent, Andy’s hand in his hair like a benediction. She swallowed, then nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, we should.”</p><p>Neither Andy nor Booker looked up as they backed out of the room, as Nile pulled the door shut behind them.</p><p>So they waited outside Andy’s room, her and Joe, and they watched the nurses go by with purpose, and the visitors wandering through looking sad and resigned (not shocked, not the way Nile had seen so many people when it came to death; there was nothing shocking about a death here in this quiet place where people came to die).</p><p>They didn’t talk.</p><p>She didn’t know how much later it was when Booker emerged. He pulled the door shut behind him, then leaned back against it. He looked haggard, Nile thought, but not drunk. It was an improvement.</p><p>“Thank you,” he said after a little while. “Thank you. She’s sleeping. I’ll go now.”</p><p>It took him some time to actually move, though. A stretch of minutes where they all just sat there together, waiting.</p>
<hr/><p>At the funeral a month later, Booker materialized out of the trees. Quynh didn’t even look at him. Nicky tilted his head, sighed, and then nodded, like an agreement, an acquiescence. Nile wrapped Booker into a hug, because someone had to, and it was Joe that was behind her, glaring at him and then drawing him into a quick rough embrace that was over as soon as it started.</p><p>“You bastard,” he said. “We’ve missed you.”</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Booker said into his shoulder, and maybe he’d say more, but it wasn’t not really the moment for it, so they all stood and watched as Quynh scattered sand over the pine coffin committing Andy’s mortal remains to the dry earth.</p><p>When it was over, they left together.</p>
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